Animating classroom ethnography: overcoming video‐fear

Abstract

This article addresses the use of video in classroom research. Influenced by the work of Deleuze on cinema, it challenges the mundane realism that continues to regulate video method, and its role in perpetuating what Deleuze calls the ‘everyday banality’ that produces and conceals the ‘intolerable’. In failing to interfere with the everyday banality of the normal child, research colludes with the production of exclusion, disadvantage and a stunted set of possible futures for children. Written by four ethnographers of early childhood who have themselves (mis)used video cameras in classrooms, the article describes an experimental video film that attempts to intervene in the repetitious production of the banal. The film takes the form of an assemblage that deploys montage, cutting, disconnections of sound, vision and script, and the jolt of the irrational cut. In particular, it tries to mobilise the barely formed, dimly glimpsed sensations that comprise ‘affect’ in its Deleuzian sense.

Keywords:

• Deleuze
• classroom ethnography
• early childhood
• video recording
• affect

Acknowledgements

We are very, very grateful to the children and teachers who took part in our research. We are also indebted to Lisa Mazzei and Phillip Prince for their contributions to the Deleuze reading group to which we all belonged at the time that this article was emerging.

Notes

1. It should be noted that Deleuze's cinema books, which influenced our thinking during the making of the film, are not manuals for movie‐making. Nor are they works of traditional film criticism. Deleuze is interested in cinema, as actualised in particular films, for the conceptual transformations that it has wrought and its resulting power to change the nature of thought itself.

2. We do not discuss in this article the development of video in autoethnographic, participatory or performance research in which control over the recording (though less frequently the editing or assembly) may be shared between researchers and subjects or given over entirely to the subjects.

3. We do not pursue in this article the particular affordances of digital technology – itself in its infancy when Deleuze wrote his cinema books. He did begin to grapple with the subject towards the end of the second book, where he discusses the new automata of the age of electronics and computing, the dispersal of power across information networks and the ‘perpetual reorganization’ of images in an ‘omni‐directional space’ that no longer privileges the vertical (Deleuze 1989, 254).

4. ‘Our real problem is, what is the goal of education? Are we forming children who are only capable of learning what is already known?’ (Piaget's Development Theory: An Overview. Davidson Films, 1989).

5. The film was originally presented at the fifth International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, University of Illinois (cf. MacLure and Holmes, 2009).

6. ‘Orthopaedic’: from the Greek, orthos, straight, correct + paideia, the rearing of children.

7. Massumi's discussion of passion is based on Spinoza's ethics, a major influence on Deleuze's writing on affect.

8. Massumi was referring specifically to writing, in his account of ‘exemplary method’ (2002, 18). However, we would argue that his account of the ramifications of ‘exemplification’ also applies to the methods that we used in making the film.

9. Deleuze was referring not only to modern cinema, but also to (what was at the time of his writing) the cinema‐to‐come of electronic technology. See Note 3 above.